A blog about condensed matter and nanoscale physics. Why should high energy and astro folks have all the fun?

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Nano book recommendation

My colleague in Rice's history department, Cyrus Mody, has a new book out called Instrumental Community, about the invention and spread of scanned probe microscopy (and microscopists) that's a very interesting read. If you've ever wondered how and why the scanning tunneling microscope and atomic force microscope took off, and why related ideas like the topografiner (pdf) did not, this is the book for you. It also does a great job of giving a sense of the personalities and work environments at places like IBM Zurich, IBM TJ Watson, IBM Almaden, and Bell Labs.

There are a couple of surprising quotes in there. Stan Williams, these days at HP Labs, says that the environment at Bell Labs was so cut-throat that people would sabotage each others' experiments and steal each others' data. Having been a postdoc there, that surprised me greatly, and doesn't gibe with my impressions or stories I'd heard. Any Bell Labs alumni readers out there care to comment?

The book really drives home what has been lost with the drastic decline of long-term industrial R&D in the US. You can see it all happening in slow motion - the constant struggle to explain why these research efforts are not a waste of shareholder resources, as companies become ever more focused on short term profits and stock prices.

4 comments:

Concerning Bell Labs research environment, that comment sounds off the wall to me (1985-2002). Certainly there was competition. I know of one researcher who was rather secretive, fearing other Bell Labs researchers might try to scoop him. But sabotage and theft? Seems unlikely.

My thoughts exactly. Given how much gossip I heard as a postdoc about past stuff at Bell, I can't believe I wouldn't have heard stories about data theft and sabotage if it had been going on to any significant level. (I did hear stories about a janitor that got let go for turning knobs at night on lab equipment, for example.)

Doug - thanks so much for the recommendation! On the question of how accurate Stan Williams' depiction is, I'd be very interested to hear from BTL alumni as well. It wouldn't surprise me if Stan is exaggerating or speaking metaphorically about data theft. His comments about competition among groups within IBM and within BTL were at the extreme end of what interviewees told me, but he certainly wasn't alone in conveying a sense of fevered competition that led to bad blood between groups working on similar projects. I should note that Stan's comments were my second choice - I had a different set of great quotes about feuding among BTL staff (though not data theft), but for perhaps obvious reasons the interviewee asked not to be quoted.

Books

About Me

My professional background: After an undergrad degree from Princeton in mechanical and aerospace engineering, I went to grad school at Stanford and got a doctorate in physics. Following a postdoctoral appointment at Bell Labs, I moved to Rice University and established a research program in experimental condensed matter physics, with a particular emphasis on nanoscale science. If you're interested in this stuff, please think about buying my book - it's a page-turner, and you'll want to finish it before the HBO miniseries spoils the ending. (That last part was a joke.) I blog regularly about science at Nanoscale Views. As should be obvious to pretty much everyone, anything I say there or here are my personal views, and in no way are official opinions of Rice University or its Department of Physics and Astronomy.